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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Severn Run High School is great. The principal and teachers are fantastic, and the facility is beautiful. The only downside is that because the boundaries of the school reach basically every corner of the county, it can be hard for kids to form tight knit friendships if one kid lives in Hanover and the other one lives in Crownsville or Annapolis. It's also very diverse, both racially and socio-economically. The school is evenly split between white and black students, and has a decent percentage of hispanic and asian kids as well. The school already has cultural clubs like Asian Student Union, Black Student Union, Muslim Student Association, and a Hispanic club. The FARMS rate is about 35%. There's some super wealthy students who live in gigantic $3M waterfront homes, a lot of middle and upper-middle-class kids, and some low-income kids as well. I'd say it is very similar to some of the schools in upper Montgomery County like Northwest or Quince Orchard High School (maybe even slightly more affluent than QO). As far as the students go, they're pretty nice and teachers have told me that they're so bored from the lack of incidents at Severn Run compared to some of the schools they came from (Meade, North County, Old Mill, etc).[/quote]

That’s wonderful to hear! Now if only the Severna Park cluster could break up…[/quote]

You can thank the BOE member who represents Severna Park for making sure that will never happen. She larps as a progressive and a liberal but then turns around and protects the racist and classist concerns of her constituents when it comes to redistricting and upholds segregation.

From the very start of the redistricting in 2023, she made a politically charged Facebook post saying she is open to all redistricting proposals except for those that move any kids from the Severna Park or Broadneck clusters out of their clusters, and she specifically mentioned her desire to not "fracture" Shipley's Choice. Unsurprisingly, Severna Park was not part of Phase I of redistricting even though all but one of the clusters it shares boundaries with were in Phase I of redistricting.

During Phase II of redistricting, there was one proposal to move kids in the Jones ES area to the Broadneck cluster and the parents went ape shit crazy. They said it would deflate their property values and that it would be a deterrent for the wealthy families who move to the area for the Severna Park schools. Lawyers in the block wrote a letterhead with a bunch of bs excuses as to why they shouldn't be moved and the sup dropped them from the redistricting proposal.

I keep hearing the excuse that "this isn't Montgomery County and we can't do certain things here," but if I was a school official, I would be far more afraid of families from Walt Whitman HS or Winston Churchill HS during school redistricting than I would be of families from Severna Park. The former are the power elite while the latter are just standard upper income working professionals with mostly normal jobs and connections. The Severna Park parents also don't even know wtf they're talking about and all of the arguments they use are so easy to shut down, while the W school parents know how to put up a good argument and they're all lawyers who went to the very top law schools, not like the lawyers in SP who mostly went to mediocre law schools.[/quote]

Yeah, it was pretty ridiculous to keep SP out of the Phase 1 redistricting.  Honestly, having Phase 1 and Phase 2 was in itself a terrible process because whatever the border was would end up artificially protecting some kids.

And I laughed out loud at the Jones ES issue.  Oh no!  The kids might go to **BROADNECK**!  HORROR! It's like they were going to be shipped off to some gulag.
It's like when the Broadneck ES parents got some upset about the possibility of going to (checks notes) the other highly ranked elementary school that feeds into their middle school.

People don't like change.  Its up to the leaders to do the right thing anyway.[/quote]

The Severna Park cluster as you put it, is not broken.  So why change it?  The schools in this area are the highest rated and best schools in the county, leave them alone.[/quote]

Severna Park schools are mediocre and only attract upwardly mobile office workers who grew up in Glen Dirty and got some more money as adults. You have one of the lowest FARMS rates in the state yet most of of your grads go to mediocre state schools like Salisbury, Towson, and AACC for college. UMD is a reach school for half of the student body at SPHS. Don’t think you’re all high and might because you do well on state tests. [/quote]

It is laughable that SPHS thinks it’s so well-off whereas anyone with a higher income would send their kids to Severn or. Spalding. I agree with PP that the colleges grads go to are pretty mediocre. [/quote]

Severna Park only has high rankings because it has a low FARMS rate. If the FARMS rate there went up by even 5% the rankings of the school would collapse overnight. However, the population of working-class students just above the poverty line is very high. That's why they willingly ship poor kids who live in SP to Chesapeake schools. Half the parents at SPHS have working-class Baltimore accents and are very Trumpy.[/quote]

It’s ridiculous the Board is still a proponent of this.[/quote]

The Board member representing Severna Park is a huge part of the problem. She has been very public and vocal about how she thinks redistricting SP and Broadneck cluster kids is off the table for her but that everyone else is fair game. She sucks and I will never vote for her if she runs for anything else in the future. She blatantly ignores her constituents who don’t reside in the SP and Broadneck clusters too. Whenever kids at SP and Broadneck cluster schools accomplish anything, she shares it to her page and celebrates it as a District 5 accomplishment. Whenever an Arundel HS student accomplishes anything she ignores it and acts like it doesn’t exist. She is always advocating hard for and visiting the SP and Broadneck cluster schools but never visits Arundel or gets involved in Arundel related activism.

Sarah McDermott is a pretty useless Board member too and it’s very obvious that she is just a career politician who views her position as a stepping stone to other political positions.  [b]I heard that she was originally not on the side of Nantucket families[/b] and only introduced her amendment due to her fear of being voted out by them if she hadn’t. You can tell [b]she wasn’t really all that passionate about any particular community[/b] or anything either way. [/quote]

That's understandable. Nantucket is full of absolute whack job parents. [/quote]

To be fair, I don’t think most of what Nantucket parents said is wrong. Shifting those kids from Crofton to Arundel does nothing besides shift overcrowding from one feeder system to another, all while severing relationships every year.

Where they messed up big time was advocating for alternative plans that didn’t do much but were still highly disruptive to some students (moving Riverwalk to the Arundel cluster) and then claiming that Crofton schools aren’t overcrowded and that no students need to be moved out. They dug their own grave once they started doing that. It would have made the most sense to shift some Crofton students to the South River cluster from a capacity standpoint but the whole “keep Crofton whole” thing prevented them from taking a closer look at that plan. [/quote]

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